Secret Information Research Articles

A Fast Method for Robust Video Watermarking Based on Zernike Moments

Watermarking by Zernike moments has been proven to be effective in providing high rotational resistance. However, due to the high computational complexity, the conventional video watermarking methods using Zernike moments are developed for videos with low resolution. Moreover, according to the properties of Zernike moments, only the matrices of equal height and width can be calculated since the inscribed circle of the original image matrix is selected as the area to be processed, but most of the available videos on the Internet do not meet such requirement. To solve the above problem, this paper proposes a fast watermarking method based on Zernike moments for high resolution videos to resist various attacks. In the proposed method, the frames of a video sequence are firstly grouped, from which a certain number of frame pairs are then selected for watermark embedding. For each frame pair to be embedded, we partition one frame into a set of disjoint blocks and apply singular value decomposition to each block to obtain a square feature matrix. Thereafter, by calculating all the Zernike moments, secret information is embedded into the selected Zernike moments to achieve superior robustness while keeping imperceptibility. Finally, according to the video encoding framework, we overwrite the frame difference of the frame pair by the watermark to resist compression and transcoding attacks. Furthermore, we propose two optional methods for compensating the special cases of rotation and scaling attacks during watermark detection. Experiments demonstrate the advantage of our method over the existing robust watermarking methods.

Hiding algorithm based fused images and Caesar cipher with intelligent security enhancement

<span lang="EN-US">The process of sending confidential data through the communication media and in complete secrecy is now necessary, whether the data is related to patients, a particular military operation, or a specified office. On the other hand, with the development of various ciphering algorithms, and information hiding algorithms, there is a need to obtain ciphered and hidden data securely without the need to exchange secret keys between the two ends of the communication. In this paper, a hiding algorithm based on fused images and Caesar cipher with intelligent methods to strengthen the security of confidential information is proposed. Firstly, fused image scattering is obtained using 1’s complement and circularly shifting the bits of fused pixels by specified positions before the hiding process. Secondly, the keys for the Caesar cipher are derived from the length of secret information according to the mathematical equation. Thirdly, strengthen the security of Caesar’s cipher by taking a 1’s complement of each letter in the cipher data. The results guarantee the security of the presented algorithm.</span>

Video and Image Steganography

Video steganography, a technique for embedding secret information within video sequences, has gained prominence in the domain of covert communication. By exploiting the inherent redundancy and high capacity of video data, this approach enables secure data transmission without raising suspicion. This paper delves into the intricacies of AES-based video steganography, with a particular focus on the integration of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm. The AES algorithm, renowned for its robust encryption capabilities, serves as a cornerstone of this steganographic approach. By encrypting the secret data prior to embedding it within the video frames, an additional layer of security is introduced, safeguarding the confidentiality of the hidden information

Optimized steganography techniques based on PVDS and genetic algorithm

Due to the rapid development of confidential digital communication over international networks, security is the most significant factor. Steganography is the science of concealed communication and is used to conceal the presence of secret information among the various methods of hiding data in communications. Steganography techniques are usually implemented either in spatial or frequency domains. Some spatial domain methods fundamentally utilize the absolute difference value between neighbor pixels to encode the secret message, categorized as Pixel-Value Differencing Steganography methods (PVDS). In PVDS, the hiding capacity of the adjacent pixels depends on their difference value. Consequently, the secret data will be embedded with a high visual quality of the stego-image. Indicator-based PVDS (IPVDS) technique is derived from the PVDS method. It depends on an Indicator pixel (IP) to extract the secret data correctly. The Genetic Algorithm (GA) approach to optimization depends on the concept of survival of the fittest. This paper introduces two proposals, GA-based steganography schemes (GA-IPVD) and (GA-IPVDM). These new techniques encoded secret data using the IPVDS method. Before embedding data in the cover image, the order of the pixels corresponding to the secret data is modified and rearranged. GA controls the operation of rearranging and modifying the order of pixels and all parameters. The current paper addresses steganography as an optimization problem and seeks to determine the optimal order of the pixels that enhance the matching between the cover image and stego-image to reduce distortion despite high embedded capacity. In the first proposed technique GA-IPVD, GA concentrates on the imperceptibility of embedded data and maximizes the quality of the stego-image according to the given secret data. In contrast, the GA maximizes the capacity of embedded data while maintaining an acceptable amount of stego-image quality in the second proposed technique GA-IPVDM. The proposed systems have embedding key that increase the security of proposed schemes. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods can embed a large quantity of secret data while maintaining an acceptable visual quality of the stego-images. The proposed technique has also demonstrated excellent resistance to a variety of stego-attacks, including the pixel difference histogram (PDH) as well as regular and singular (RS) analyses. Additionally, the out-of-boundary pixel issue (BI), which endures in the majority of modern data hiding algorithms, has been successfully resolved.

Efficient Quantum Private Comparison without Sharing a Key.

Quantum private comparison (QPC) allows at least two users to compare the equality of their secret information, for which the security is based on the properties of quantum mechanics. To improve the use of quantum resources and the efficiency of private comparison, a new QPC protocol based on GHZ-like states is proposed. The protocol adopts unitary operations to encode the secret information instead of performing quantum key distribution (QKD), which can reduce the amount of computation required to perform QKD and improve the utilization of quantum resources. The decoy photon technique used to detect channel eavesdropping ensures that the protocol is resistant to external attacks. The quantum efficiency of the protocol reaches 66%. Compared with many previous QPC schemes, the proposed protocol does not need to share a key and has advantages in quantum efficiency and quantum resources.

Integrated semi‐quantum layered communication

AbstractIn recent times, secure quantum communication in layered networks has emerged as an important area of study. The authors harness the potential offered by multidimensional states in secure quantum communication with only one quantum participant and all the other classical participants. Three protocols are proposed for—(i) entanglement‐based layered semi‐quantum key distribution, (ii) layered semi‐quantum secret sharing, and (iii) integrated layered semi‐quantum key distribution and secret sharing to share secret information in arbitrarily layered networks. These protocols integrate the features of semi‐quantum communication in layered networks. All three protocols allow for simultaneous distribution of secure information in all the layers of a network, thanks to the employment of multidimensional states. These protocols are presented for a small network of at most five participants and three layers and show the robustness of the same against various eavesdropping strategies. Finally, a detailed procedure is provided for generalisations of the proposed protocols to distribute keys/secrets in any arbitrarily structured quantum network.

Dreams of Declassification: The Early Cold War Quest for Nuclear Knowledge in The Netherlands and Norway

This article seeks to explore the relation between nuclear physics and secrecy in early Cold War Europe. After World War II, nuclear physics re-emerged from the Manhattan Project as a largely classified field. Over time, the boundary between secret and unclassified information set by the United States moved due to both political and scientific developments. This shifting boundary of secrecy is taken as a place to investigate power relations in the context of Cold War Science. The Netherlands and Norway are two countries with early nuclear programs that tried to move this boundary, in part by building a joint reactor in 1951. Whereas they requested classified information from the US in 1946, their programs developed to a point where the US made requests to classify nuclear information in Europe by 1960. Between 1954 and 1960, the joint reactor program became the site of a multilateral intelligence operation. Secrecy was used as an intelligence tool to spread nuclear disinformation to the Soviet Union. This history shows how (de)classification opened and closed windows of opportunity and sheds light on the effectiveness of classification.

Pengaturan Informasi Rahasia Dagang Dalam Perspektif Undang-Undang Nomor 8 Tahun 1999 Tentang Perlindungan Konsumen

The legal issues discussed in this normative research are information regulation in Law Number 8 of 1999 concerning Consumer Protection and Law Number 30 of 2000 concerning Trade Secrets and legal protection against disclosure of trade secret information in the perspective of Law Number 8 of 1999 About Consumer Protection in the future. The research method used is normative juridical research with a statute approach and a conceptual approach. The legal materials used are: primary legal materials, secondary legal materials, and tertiary legal materials. Analysis of the collected legal material is carried out by inventorying, systematizing and interpreting. The results of the study show that the regulation of information in Law Number 8 of 1999 concerning consumer protection aims to create a consumer protection system that contains elements of legal certainty and information disclosure as well as access to obtain correct, clear and honest information regarding conditions and guarantees of goods and/or or Information services and arrangements in Law Number 30 of 2000 concerning Trade Secrets provide legal protection to Trade Secret rights holders for information that is not publicly known in the field of technology and/or business, has economic value because it is useful in business activities, and is safeguarded confidentiality by the owner of the Trade Secret.

Robust image steganography against lossy JPEG compression based on embedding domain selection and adaptive error correction

Transmitting images for communication on social networks has become routine, which is helpful for covert communication. The traditional steganography algorithm is unable to successfully convey secret information since the social network channel will perform lossy operations on images, such as JPEG compression. Previous studies tried to solve this problem by enhancing the robustness or making the cover adapt to the channel processing. In this study, we proposed a robust image steganography method against lossy JPEG compression based on embedding domain selection and adaptive error correction. To improve anti-steganalysis performance, the embedding domain is selected adaptively. To increase robustness and lessen the impact on anti-steganalysis performance, the error correction capacity of the error correction code is adaptively adjusted to eliminate redundancy. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better anti-steganalysis and robustness.

Composition-Aware Image Steganography Through Adversarial Self-Generated Supervision.

Steganography is an important and prevailing information hiding tool to perform secret message transmission in an open environment. Existing steganography methods can mainly fall into two categories: predefined rule-based and data-driven methods. The former is susceptible to the statistical attack, while the latter adopts the deep convolution neural networks to promote security. However, deep learning-based methods suffer from perceptible artificial artifacts or deep steganalysis. In this article, we introduce a novel composition-aware image steganography (CAIS) to guarantee both visual security and resistance to deep steganalysis through the self-generated supervision. The key innovation is an adversarial composition estimation module, which has integrated the rule-based composition method and generative adversarial network to help synthesize steganographic images with more naturalness. We first perform a rule-based image blending method to obtain infinite synthetically data-label pairs. Then, we utilize an adversarial composition estimation branch to recognize the message feature pattern from the composite image based on these self-generated data-label pairs. Through the adversarial training, we force the steganography function to synthesize steganographic images, which can fool the composition estimation network. Thus, the proposed CAIS can achieve better information hiding and higher security to resist deep steganalysis. Furthermore, an effective global-and-part checking is designed to alleviate visual artifacts caused by hiding secret information. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of CAIS from various aspects (e.g., security and robustness) to verify the superior performance of the proposed method. Comprehensive experimental results on three large-scale widely used datasets have demonstrated the superior performance of our CAIS compared with several state-of-the-art approaches.

High-Capacity Imperceptible Data Hiding Using Permutation-Based Embedding Process for IoT Security

The internet of things (IoT) has become a popular technology in communication which utilizes the concept of connecting things together and exchanges information through various networks. Since data can be transferred through a wide range of channels, IoT systems suffer from potential data leakages. One of the common ways to reduce such risks is to engage steganography with secret information during transmission. A novel scheme proposed in this paper exploits simple pixel permutations to embed secret data. Instead of handling pixel blocks, the proposed scheme maneuvers on pixels directly. The proposed scheme simply manipulates the sequenced pixels using two coefficients, a threshold of range for pixel values, and a specified clustering count to fulfill the two major requirements of effective data hiding. The experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme provides a satisfactory embedding capacity and preserves a high level of image visual quality. The overall performance of the proposed scheme demonstrates its high potential in IoT security.

Optimal location using genetic algorithms for chaotic image steganography technique based on discrete framelet transform

The development of network technology and its use have led society into the internet world and communication through digital data. The ease of access to digital resources and the possibility of unauthorized copies and distribution of them have gave rise to the significant challenge of protecting the ownership of these data. In this context, steganography is cited as a possible solution to some of these problems. Steganography can be understood as the practice of hiding secret information within another object, as for instance a text, image or video, such that the presence of this hidden information is not evident and it can be extracted if necessary. In this paper we provide an image steganography algorithm in order to insert a grayscale secret image into a RGB color cover image. This algorithm is based on a general hybrid chaos map and a 3D shift function applied to the pixels of a color image. In order to select suitable hiding places in the host image, we develop a genetic algorithm with permutation encoding aiming to optimize this task. We demonstrate empirically the effectiveness of the proposed method from various perspectives, including transparency, security, and resistance.

Applications of Difital Image Stegnographic Techniques in Medical Image Analysis

In this digitized world maintaining the security of the secret information is a challenging task. While, sending secret information through the internet draws the attention of hackers. The highly authenticated information can be hidden by using Steganography. Image processing plays a very important role in such stenographic techniques. The advantage of stenography can be enhanced to medical images and creation of database for a particular patient under one authentication with security. Steganography techniques used in bio-medical field to hide the person medical data like prescription, X-ray, Iris, MRI, CT scan images behind a single cover media. In this paper the embedding Schemes to store complete medical data under one authentication is done by using Spatial and transform domains. The performance of the techniques is compared and the best method to hide medical information by using steganographic techniques with high PSNR, less MSE and high SSIM is identified for different modalities. Implementation of steganography in bio-medical field yields high imperceptibility and embedding capacity

Semi-quantum dialogue scheme based on hyperentangled Bell states

Quantum dialogue enables two communicators to send their own secret information to each other, but most of the current quantum dialogue protocols have high requirements for the hardware equipment and capabilities of the communicators. In order to reduce the cost of participant, a semi-quantum dialogue scheme based on hyperentangled Bell states is studied in this paper. In our protocol, we combines the idea of semi-quantum key distribution and semi-quantum secure direct communication to realize the exchange of secret information between Alice and Bob, Alice’s information is transmitted to Bob through semi-quantum secure direct communication, while Bob’s message is extracted by Alice through semi-quantum key distribution and one-time pad encryption. This is different from the previous semi-quantum dialogue protocols, and is a new way of thinking. The security analysis shows that our protocol can not only resist the conventional attack strategies, but also has not the drawback of ‘information leakage’ problem. Compared with the existing semi-quantum dialogue protocols, it has some advantages, such as high communication efficiency, saving classical participant’s consumption and security. Although this protocol requires the preparation and analysis of hyperentangled Bell state, which are slightly more complex, it will be shown that all these are achievable by current technology. Our protocol is fully implementable, so it has good application prospects.

A review of coverless steganography

With the enhancement of people’s security awareness, transmitting secret information securely has gradually become a demand for the public. Steganography is a technology of representing secret information within another carrier, aiming at transmitting secret information without causing suspicion. Most of the traditional steganographic algorithms hide secret information by modifying the statistical characteristics, which will leave traces to the carriers. Although these modifications are too tiny to be distinguished by human eyes, they can be detected by steganalysis algorithms. Differently, coverless steganography, also written as steganography without embedding, accomplish the process of information hiding by constructing the relationship between secret information and carriers. Due to no modification to the carriers, all of the steganalysis algorithms are expired. In this paper, more than 90 papers are included to provide a review in coverless steganographic algorithms, covering the major development process of coverless image and video steganographic algorithms. The main contribution of the existing methods is summarized. Besides, the current general issues of capacity, robustness, and security are discussed adequately for both image and video algorithms. Especially, the security of coverless steganography is discussed for the first time from theoretical analysis to actual investigation in this review.

Experimental results of electromagnetic analysis on smartcard

Abstract— Electromagnetic analysis attack is a form of side channel attack that can be used to reveal secret information of a cryptographic device by examination of electromagnetic radiations. The effectiveness of EMA has a large dependences on the quality of the electromagnetic radiation measured by the measuring system and how the EM traces are simulated during the key recovery procedures. In this paper, we propose the practical procedure for electromagnetic analysis attack methods and the experimental results of EMA on smartcard that implemented AES algorithm, including assessing the influence of measuring system, radiation leakage model on effectiveness of attacks.

Image Watermarking Framework using Histogram Equalization and Visual Saliency

This paper proposes a digital image watermarking strategy using histogram equalization and visual Saliency followed by LSB (Least Significant Bit) replacement for better imperceptibility with hiding capacity. With this technique, a saliency map determines lesser-observable parts of the original image and gradually implants with increasing amounts of information based on histogram equalization information. The output from saliency is the perceptible areas within an image, which is the most notable position from the perspective of vision; as a result, any changes made other than those areas will be less noticeable to viewers. Implementing the histogram method helps identify the areas where we can hide our secret information within that image. Using the LSB replacement technique, we adaptively insert our confidential data into the original image. Here, we use the saliency map to find out the non-salient region or less perceptible region to improve the imperceptibility, and the histogram equalization technique is used to maximize the hiding capacity within those less perceptible regions. So that we can improve the imperceptibility as well as the hiding capacity.

Efficient Mediated Quantum Secret Sharing Protocol in a Restricted Quantum Environment

AbstractThe multiparty‐mediated quantum secret sharing (MQSS) protocol proposed by Tsai et al. [Quantum Inf. Process., 2022, 21, 63] allows n restricted users with limited quantum capabilities to share secret information using a dishonest third party with full quantum capabilities. Although the MQSS protocol allows restricted users to achieve secret sharing with lightweight quantum capabilities, the qubit efficiency of this protocol can be further improved. Therefore, this study proposes a measurement property of the graph state to design an efficient mediated quantum secret‐sharing protocol in the same quantum environment as that of Tsai et al.’s protocol. The proposed MQSS protocol not only inherits the lightweight property of Tsai et al.’s protocol but also improves the qubit efficiency of Tsai et al.’s protocol by times. Security analysis is performed to show that the proposed MQSS protocol can avoid collective, collusion, and Trojan horse attacks. Furthermore, this study uses quantum network simulation software to implement Tsai et al.’s protocol and the proposed protocol to prove the feasibility of the proposed MQSS protocol and show that it is more efficient than Tsai et al.’s protocol.

Research and application of Big data encryption technology based on quantum lightweight image encryption

Given the limitations of current classic image encryption algorithms and the unconditional security characteristics of quantum key distribution protocols, the author proposes an image encryption method based on quantum key distribution and pixel scrambling. The author first analyzed the security issues of quantum image encryption algorithms based on image scrambling methods, namely that image scrambling methods have periodicity, which can ensure that the image can be restored after scrambling. If an image cannot be guaranteed to return to its original state after performing scrambling operations, legitimate users cannot obtain the secret information in the original image, and image scrambling loses its original meaning; However, the periodicity of image scrambling methods not only ensures that legitimate users can decrypt images, but also provides convenience for attackers to steal original image information. Secondly, it is pointed out that when evaluating and analyzing quantum image encryption algorithms, the evaluation indicators should include two parts: One is performance analysis, which is the analysis of the network complexity of quantum circuits. In quantum computing, the network complexity of quantum circuits is usually represented by the number of quantum basic logic gates. The second is security analysis, which mainly includes key analysis (including key space size and key sensitivity analysis), statistical analysis (including pixel correlation, histogram analysis, information fusion, and scatter plot distribution density analysis). Finally, experimental simulations have shown that the NPCR values of the plaintext and ciphertext images of the three images tend to 100%. The encrypted image histogram is evenly distributed, with very weak pixel correlation and high pixel change rate and information entropy.

Seismic Soundoff: The sound of seismic

Paolo Dell'Aversana highlights his recent article in The Leading Edge, “An expanded idea of imaging in geophysics through multimodal data analysis.” The article explores a dual-sensory approach to understanding seismic data. This episode unlocks secret information hiding in seismic data that is waiting to be discovered.